Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau tried to stem the drain of senior civil service talent by easing up on security restrictions for homosexuals.

“Trudeau saw the end of the External Affairs department with so many top people being investigated and seen at orgies, that he opted for keeping them if they accepted medical treatment,” said a former top-level RCMP officer.

“But the Russians never eased up one bit in blackmailing homosexuals in government. Many had families to conceal it from. It’s still a Sodom and Gomorrah in Ottawa.”

The RCMP investigation of the blackmailed ambassadors, helped by the CIA and FBI, delved deeply into the chain in External that had promoted suspect ambassadors, at least four, to sensitive posts.

Part of that investigation was directed at Pearson, a friend of Watkins who had served as external affairs minister before becoming prime minister.

The FBI had 4,000 transcript pages of testimony, interrogation and cross-references from and about Elizabeth Bentley, long-time secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S. Included in the bundle sent to Ottawa was Bentley’s secret testimony before the U.S. Senate Internal Security subcommittee.

She testified that during World War II, Pearson as ambassador to Washington, had fed details of top-secret deliberations among western Allied powers to a Soviet agent, Hazen Size.

Bentley said Pearson knew that Size was a Soviet agent. Size, an architect, came to Ottawa after the war and worked for the National Capital Commission until his retirement. He died in Montreal several years ago.

The U.S. spooks were also unnerved by Pearson’s vigorous defence of his colleague, Herbert Norman, ambassador to Egypt who had jumped to his death in Cairo in 1957.

While Pearson was denouncing in Parliament the senate committee’s “witch-hunt” in identifying Norman as a communist, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower held a CIA dispatch from Cairo.

The message told him that on the night before Norman died, he had dined with a doctor friend and, according to the doctor, Norman said he feared that a royal commission would be called into the U.S. allegations.

If called to testify, Norman said he would be forced to implicate “60 or 70″ definite and possibly up to 400 Canadians and Americans in a Soviet spy network. He said he’d rather kill himself.

The most startling disclosure in the suppressed “Featherbed File” deals with almost similar statements by two former top officials in External Affairs, Herbert Norman and Hugh Hambleton (now of Laval University). In both cases, these exposed Soviet infiltrators expressed concern that if they admitted their own complicity “many others would be involved in top places.” Here is what the August, 1957, CIS issue reported on the Norman Case:

Early this month Willard Edwards, head of the Washington bureau of the Chicago Tribune Press Service, filed a most significant story relating to the “Norman Case.” Because it was widely suppressed by Canadian press and radio, we are reproducing, in part, the release which appeared in the July 12th Tribune.

“Washington, July 11 — Canadian Ambassador Herbert E. Norman leaped to his death in Cairo last April 4 because he could not face the prospect of an investigation in which he would be forced to involve a large group of American and Canadian officials.

“This is the gist of a highly secret report in the files of Canadian and American intelligence agencies which has deeply disturbed the government*; of both countries.

Norman’s Confession

“Norman’s suicide has remained officially a mystery. Originally, the Canadian government, then led by Lester B. Pearson, secretary of state for external affairs, attacked the senate internal security subcommittee for ‘slanders’ and ‘unsupported insinuations’ regarding the ambassador’s alleged communist background which caused him such mental grief that he ended his life.

“But new evidence from Cairo has furnished an entirely different motive. It came from an agent, given the highest classification for trustworthiness, who reported as follows:

“On the eve of his suicide, Norman had dinner with his personal physician and confessed to him his mental tribulations over the international storm aroused by the senate group’s disclosures.

Would Involve 60 or 70

“‘I fear that St. Laurent is not backing me up in this affair,’ Norman was quoted as saying. ‘I am seriously thinking of suicide. If there is an inquiry and I am forced to testify, I would have to involve 60 or 70 Americans and Canadian officials.’

“Early the next morning, Norman went to the top of the highest building in Cairo and jumped. He left two suicide notes, the major portions of which have been impounded by the Canadian government.”

Who Is Involved?

Willard Edwards, in the closing paragraphs of his story, relates Norman’s activities in the Institute of Pacific Relations, which was found by a Congressional committee to be “an instrument of communist policy, propaganda and intelligence.”

At the present time two of the key figures in the External Affairs Department are Chester Ronning and Escott Reid, Commander William Guy Carr, on page 213 of Red Fog Over America, gives the details of the pro-Communist backgrounds of these officials, both of whom were members of the Institute of Pacific Relations.

Are these key figures, operating at the policy-making level of our government, two of those whom Norman would have had to identify?

Would several figures prominent in the annual Lake Couchiching ‘Conference’, sponsored by the Institute of International Affairs and the CBC, have been identified?

These vital questions cannot be brushed aside just because Mr. Pearson was removed from his ministerial post a few weeks ago. The others involved still hold key posts in Ottawa.

Some background information is necessary in order to understand the link-up between the Comintern (Communist International) and the KGB Soviet secret police in the context of Soviet penetration of the Federal civil service.

Let us go to the outstanding authority on the Comintern, Victor Serge, who broke with Stalin in 1936 after having been an outstanding member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. In the February, 1947 issue of the magazine Plain Talk, in an article entitled Inside the Comintern, Serge gave this first-hand description of the Comintern:

The central bureaus of the Comintern in Moscow, located in a vast building opposite the Kremlin, guarded by the GPU, became a sort of worldwide intelligence center such as exists in no other country in the world. The central apparatus of the Comintern was subdivided into regional bureaus for the Latin countries, Central Europe, Scandinavia, the Middle East, the Far East, North America, Latin America, etc. These subdivisions varied with the needs of the moment. Each of these bureaus is, in turn, subdivided by countries. Economists, sociologists, political analysts examine with microscopic care the literature, press, secret intelligence, and other pertinent information stemming from the country of their specialization. They study the political configuration of these countries, and on the basis of their forecasts, the activities of Soviet agents throughout the world are outlined. This digested information and the elaborate plans worked out are finally submitted to the Politburo, passing through the hands of the party secretariat.

The ten years since the bloody purges of 1936-37 liquidated the Comintern’s former staffs have witnessed the formation of a new highly qualified personnel in this organization. A colossal set of archives has been accumulated and kept strictly up to date. No government anywhere has at its disposal as complete and documented an archive on its own country! Filed with the Comintern are the dossiers of sympathizers, active Communists, agents, subagents, anti-Communists, intellectuals, politicians, businessmen — all the material showing their usefulness to the Soviet Union, their corruptibility, their value in the struggle against the world. Two years after the “dissolution” of the Comintern, dossiers of the heads of the Canadian Communist party, removed by Igor Gouzenko from the files of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, included notations such as “Sam Carr, alias Frank, member of the Labor Progressive Party, see detailed biography at the Center, Comintern.”

There has never been any question of “dissolving” or “liquidating” this remarkable inner organization. It has become an integral part of the Soviet state mechanism. And it would be stupid to doubt that these Comintern bureaus continue to gather their intelligence data, to stuff their dossiers, to supply their agents. If the Politburo were to decide to “reconstitute” the Comintern, under its old name or a fancy new one, officially or unofficially, it could do so with the scrawl of a pen — complete to the last dossier and the last pay voucher.

The Sam Carr referred to was the National Secretary of the Communist Party in Canada in the ’40s who was one of the masterminds of the Soviet spy network in the federal civil service. The Communist Party, after being banned in W.W. II, changed its name to the Labour Progressive Party, but with the same leadership as before.

It is not the purpose of this booklet to attempt to give the whole background of the Soviet KGB secret police. The informative book, KGB [The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents] is undoubtedly the most authoritative account of the KGB and is available from Canadian Intelligence Publications (CIP), although pressure from Ottawa has prevented Bantam Book (Canada) from publishing a Canadian edition for very obvious reasons which any careful reader can ascertain.

We must point out that although Soviet espionage generally operates on a parallel but separate level, the Canadian Royal Commission Report on Soviet espionage (generally referred to as the Gouzenko Report because of the involvement initially of Igor Gouzenko, a cypher clerk at the Soviet Embassy who defected and brought with him substantial proof of the existence of a Soviet military intelligence network operating within the Canadian government) did mention that several Soviet spy rings were operating in Canada, including the NKVD (now the KGB), and that the “Centre” (Comintern) had provided dossiers on some of the participants, including Sam Carr and Fred Rose, M.P. for Montreal-Cartier Constituency.

From the accumulation of material “leaked” to various individuals, plus the revelations in Chapman Picher’s book, Their Trade is Treachery, we are now in a better position to link the Comintern-KGB “connection” inasfar as the penetration of the civil service in general and the External Affairs Department in particular are concerned.

Readers of the Canadian Intelligence Service [CIS] for over 30 years and more recent On Target readers, of course, will find nothing startling in this booklet, except the Oscar Skelton “affair.” Had we published all of the CIS material dealing with treason and subversion in Ottawa, a more lengthy book would have been necessary. It is to the credit of the CIS publisher and editor, Ron Gostick, that such explosive material was printed and circulated, albeit to a smaller readership than the CIS has today. In 1982, belatedly, the CIS articles (especially dealing with the Herbert Norman and Jean-Louis Gagnon cases) are now becoming increasingly vindicated.